Steam Family Sharing allows close friends and family members to play one another's games while earning their own Steam achievements and saving their own game progress to the Steam cloud. It's all enabled by authorizing a shared computer.

Sounds neat, but it does look convoluted and complex. I have a simpler system, which is quite revolutionary. It's called physical copies and I can just give them to friends. It's magic.

And I'm with you on the insane price of console games too, though actually it's always been pretty high; I remember my brother and I saving up money for weeks to buy Final Fantasy VI (FF3 here in the US) for the SNES for $70, and we took turns playing the same save game since we both "owned" it.

Agreed. Most of my games as a kid were shareware like Commander Keen 4 that I bought for a few bucks at the local K Mart and then never registered because I was unwilling to mail my allowance to another country and wait an eternity (weeks).

In fact, most of the PC games I did buy in full versions were from the $15-30 "we've made our money and are trying to monetize our back catalog" classics bin.

As for consoles, I think, over the entire course of our ownership of it, we had maybe a dozen SNES games at most... all begged from parents after we concluding that they would hold our interest long enough to not make continued rentals from the local Microplay cost-effective.

...now that I think about it, that's probably the biggest difference.

At high prices, a lot of cash used to flow to rental stores and now stays out of circulation as piracy is used as a "try before you buy" that makes it possible to "try forever without buying".

At lower prices and emboldened by newfangled things like YouTube reviews, people are more willing to take a chance on the convenience of just tossing a few bucks at each developer via Steam or GOG or what have you. (Hence gaben's statement that piracy is a service issue.)